Kitchen Redecorating Ideas

Kitchen Remodeling Ideas
Your kitchen is the hub of your home. It’s where your family comes together to talk about their day, eat delicious meals, and relax with a nice cup of coffee. But sometimes you can get bored with the same design of the area over time, and think about what you can do to brighten up the space, or give it a warmer feeling. Taking on a kitchen makeover is not for the faint of heart, and you should be prepared to exercise a great deal of patience while renovations are under way.
According to kitchens.com, “Think of a kitchen remodel the same way you would think about partaking in a weight loss program: no matter what anyone tells you, it's not happening overnight. Your patience will be tested; you'll consider cutting corners that aren't worth cutting.”

Investing in your Home
An updated kitchen is one of the best investments that you can make in your home, and many times it adds more than just the cost of the project to your home’s value. In fact, a kitchen remodel for homes everywhere will increase the value of your home. It’s a lot of work, but if you can hang in there, the results are well worth it.

Budget
If you are like me, you have great plans for how you would like your kitchen to look and function, but not necessarily the funds to make your dreams come true. But don’t worry; there are still plenty of things you can do to spruce up the place on a budget. For instance; start with a simple paint job.
“To paint cabinets, first prime them with a de-glossing primer to help the paint adhere and eliminate the need for messy sanding,” says bhg.com. “Painting cabinets is time-consuming -- you need to remove doors, drawers, and hardware to do a thorough job -- but the results give you a fresh look for minimal cost.”
When looking at how much you can afford to spend on renovations, consider what kinds of improvements are most important to you. If what you crave is new appliances, scour the internet in search of the best deal. New cabinets can be relatively cheap depending on what kind of material and style you want to go with. A fresh coat of paint can many times change the entire feel of a room, and paint is not very expensive at all.

At a Little Cornish Home we managed to completely overhaul the kitchen but kept to a tight budget with second hand units and painted walls. We shopped around and got many quotes for the new doors and shopped on e-bay for the handles by shopping in a variety of different stores we managed to get the best prices and even a free dishwasher from a house clearance meaning the kitchen looks amazing but didn’t cost us a fortune.

Christmas is coming and the DIY continues

We have invited my parents over for Christmas and they currently live in Essex, they have seen our new house twice the first time in January 2013 when the house really was nothing more than a building site and again in the summer of 2013 when the house had progressed further out of the realm of building site and slightly more into the realm of home but we were still living with a concrete floor and a lot of temporary fixtures including a very temporary landing with no banister and no bathroom door.

With just two weekends to go until the family arrive from Essex panic is calmly setting in as we muddle through constant lists of things to do and buy to get the house as complete as possible for the big day.

Although not major jobs there are lots of things that still need doing, here we fill all the holes where the panels have been screwed into kitchen units to make them nice and smooth ready for final painting. Although not essential to get done for Christmas it's nice to get the kitchen closer to being finished. 

The island we built ourselves using second hand kitchen units and match board panelling now gets prepared for painting.

Once the filler has dried and been sanded the kitchen units can get painted. 

More painting in the kitchen, painting big walls in the final coat really does make a massive difference and means we are yet again closer to getting things finished in time. Whilst most people are having a stressful Christmas with thinking about the Christmas dinner and what presents to buy people we have all of this added to the fact that this is the first ever Christmas we are hosting and the constant strain of so much work to do to get the house as finished as possible. I'm saying as finished as possible as we know it will be impossible to get it completely finished by Christmas but hopefully we can get very close. 

Scaffold board shelf

There are parts of the house that we wanted to change that were just not possible, if we had an endless pot of money then these would be possible but without the large funds needed some things we will have to live with.

One area that we could not change was a massive section of concrete under the radiator on a kitchen wall, this section is part of a structural wall and could be removed but would be quite a major job and so we decided it would be safer and cheaper to leave the concrete in place and make a feature out of it.

As you can see in the below image there is a thick chunk of concrete under the new radiator in the kitchen.

We have now created a box section over this and topped it with a scaffold board shelf. This has made a beautiful feature of a section of the old house that we couldn't change and is the perfect place to display my collection of lanterns. What was once a problematic lump of concrete in the house now looks beautifully restored.

Built in wine rack now added to our custom kitchen

We originally wanted to include a section for chopping boards and left enough gap for these to be included in between the kitchen cupboard and the dishwasher but whilst I was away for the weekend James decided that it would be far more useful to build a wine rack in that space and keep the chopping boards elsewhere. I completely agree and storing more wine is a much better use of space!

Now all it needs is a lick of paint and it will look like it was meant to be there all along! 

Finishing off kitchen cupboards

When building our own custom kitchen a lot of things have been needed to be custom created. Although we bought off the shelf kitchen plinths for the bottoms of the units we didn't have anything for the bottoms of the raised cupboards. Here we used off cuts of plinth that was cut off to level them into the floor and they look lovely. Not having enough money to go out and buy everything that is ideally needed makes you much more resourceful and shows that you really can build a kitchen on a budget.

How to build a bespoke kitchen on a small budget.

When we bought our first house we bought on a shoestring budget and we bought a complete do-er up-er hoping that with the skills of my partner and his dad we would be able to build what we wanted but at a fraction of the cost.

Apart from a plumber, a plasterer and an electrician all the work has been completed by the family on a very small budget considering the work that has been carried out. The kitchen now looks like a bespoke £10k kitchen but at a fraction of the cost.

You don't have to buy new.
First we managed to buy a second hand kitchen, try searching through local papers and E-bay to find a second hand kitchen. It doesn't matter what doors or work tops are on the kitchen just make sure that the carcasses are in good condition. We were lucky and managed to pick up a second hand kitchen for £300 and this included nearly enough kitchen units for the whole kitchen including the island.

Shop around.
With the kitchen units in place it was now time to buy the cupboard doors and here is where we spent the most money. My biggest piece of advice is to shop around we started our search in all the local stores including Homebase and B&Q and got quotes from these. We then went to places like Howdens for further quotes but these were still coming out higher than our budget allowed. Then we took to the internet and found a company that would make all the custom door sizes that we needed for around half the cost. There was a wait for the doors to be made but the savings we made the wait was worth it. The bonus with building our kitchen ourselves was that for each section we could shop around for the best price. Our kitchen sink came from Ikea, the worktop from Homebase, the doors, hinges, draw runners and door handles all online the match board from the local Jewsons and tiles from Topps Tiles. Each shop has its own special offers and deals so it is worth shopping around if your on a tight budget but it is possible to build a stunning kitchen for a quarter of the cost.

Finishing touches.
Next buy your door handles and hinges and again we shopped around and found a supplier on E-bay that was selling soft close hinges for 99p each. We now have a beautiful kitchen with amazing soft close doors and draws and it looks expensive but it really didn't cost a fortune.

If in doubt get the paint out!
Even if you can't afford a whole new kitchen by painting an old kitchen and just buying new handles can make a massive difference and give your kitchen a fresh new look. With all the end panels in the kitchen, rather than buying matching panels in the same material as the doors we used a match board style MDF and painted them. This same material was used all around the island and looks wonderful.

Adding the finishing touches to the kitchen

We are now speeding through the finishing touches in our house and now we have added the plinths to the underside of the kitchen units.

However this wasn't a straight forward job. With the floors still slightly uneven the plinths had to be customised and scribed in to fit snugly. It's so nice to see the kitchen that already looked amazing look even more finished.  

Now we just need some skirting to complete this section!

Kitchen doors and handles now fitted.

This is really the biggest transformation to our home so far, adding new kitchen doors and handles throughout. We bought the kitchen second hand as we didn't have the budget to buy a whole new fitted kitchen so with James's clever skills he used all the kitchen carcasses to layout the kitchen how we wanted with the view to put all new doors and handles on at a later date. Well that later date has arrived and we have chosen the most beautiful off white/cream kitchen doors and it is now time to fit them.

Choosing kitchen door handles is an incredibly hard job and finding the right style was near impossible for me so I left this up to James and what he picked was just perfect and I love them. I thought the kitchen was already looking good before but now the whole place is transformed yet again.

Another thing that James insisted on having was soft close EVERYTHING he was adamant that we were to spend the extra money to get soft close hinges for the doors and soft close hinges for the draws. I must admit it is nice but I don't think I am quite as excited as he is and miss being able to slam cupboard doors in anger!

Skirting boards added to our home

It really does feel like we are flying through the jobs list and the finishing touches are happening thick and fast right now. Fingers crossed if we keep working this hard we will have the downstairs complete ready in time for Christmas.

Although we were in the house for last Christmas the place was a real building site so to get the downstairs ready it will really feel like our first Christmas in our new home and I can not wait. Check out the pictures from Christmas last year and you'll understand why it wasn't a very festive place to stay.

Now we continue with all the finishing jobs and this time we add skirting around the bottom of the island.

All it needs now is a coat of paint and that's another job done. 

How not to cook a Sunday roast!

With so much progress in the house and James working so hard I decided to treat him in the best way possible and that's through his stomach. I decided to cook up a beautiful roast dinner with pork, crackling and Yorkshire puddings all his favourites. However our over decided that it was having other ideas and decided that the fan at the back would stop spinning and set itself on fire. 

Here James is trying to salvage the situation and stop all of the hard work in our house going up in flames. Luckily no damage was done but we did have to suffer with a Chinese take away rather than a roast dinner on a Sunday!

Painting the kitchen

The house is really coming together quickly now with lots of finishing touches being completed. Here the kitchen ceiling is painted in white with the walls painted in a B&Q colour called Alfie. 

The colour is slightly more grey than we wanted and were hoping for a more brown warmer toned colour but we will leave it for a while and see if it grows on us and if we still don't like it we might change it but for now with so many other jobs to do it is staying this colour.

Painting in the kkitchen

With the plaster board now fully dry we can really get the kitchen looking more complete with more painting. The walls are going in a light chocolatey brown and the ceiling going in white.

First coats of white undercoat going in the kitchen areas

The ceiling and walls now coated in their first base coats of white.

With all the walls painted in a nice clean white it really does start to look amazing and can see the end in sight for finishing the downstairs of our little Cornish home. Check out my blog tomorrow to see how the kitchen looks when some coloured paint goes on the walls.

Grouting the tiles in the Kitchen

Another job is successfully ticked off the massive list of house building jobs and the tiling is now grouted. (ignore the tiling that is not completed at the end, we have issues with the outside wall that needs repairing and rebuilding and until that done the inside is not going to be complete.)

We knew that the red tiles were particularly bright and didn't want to go for a super white grout so decided to go for an off white cream grout to tone the tiles down and think it looks amazing.

Next job more painting in the kitchen and fitting more kitchen cupboards.

Tiling continues in the kitchen

Work continues in the house with more tiling and suddenly the bright red tiles seem.... extremely bright! When we went tile shopping we had in our minds that we wanted to go for warm neutral colours tones of brown and creams but when we got to the tile showroom and saw these we both feel in love and took home some samples before going for the plunge. 

With months of knocking through walls and removing rubble it's really exciting to see how our house will look finished and is helping to spur on the enthusiasm to continue working hard on the build and renovation. 

The most amazing kitchen tiles ever!

OK so the most amazing kitchen tiles EVER might be a bit of an over statement but theses tiles are pretty amazing. Throughout my life I have lived at my parents who has a country style kitchen with painted walls and a small tile splash back around the kitchen sink. I've also had various rented accommodation where the kitchens are fitted with the cheapest tiles in neutral colours. More often than not browns and beige tiles are a favourite for being the most appealing to the widest amount of tenants.   

Now that we own our own home our instant thought was to play it safe and go with some neutral tiles, keeping the kitchen simple especially for any future resale. But then we visited the tile show room and found these bright red tiles! We bought a few sample tiles in the bright red and also in a cream and white and placed them in the kitchen for a few days to see which ones we liked the most. It was a hands down favourite with both of us, we ordered up the tiles and next the job of fitting the outrageously bright red tiles. 

As the wall behind the oven filled up we were beginning to wonder if we had made the right choice as it is extremely bright but the more rows of tiling that have been completed the more we fell in love with the colour.

Now to grout the tiling and re fit the extractor hob and part of the kitchen is nearly complete.

The boys arrive to crack on with the plastering

The boys arrive bright and early at the weekend to plaster the kitchen. This includes the kitchen ceiling and kitchen walls. Seeing the last parts of the open plan downstairs getting plastered is really exciting as it means that we can soon finish the kitchen and finally see the restoration come to a finish.

James and his dad drinking coffee whilst our hired plasterer gets to work on the plastering. 

Our extremely happy plasterer Tom from Candy plastering in Newquay. If your wondering why the plaster doesn't go all the way down to the kitchen tops this is because it doesn't need to as the tiles will be going over this part of the wall.  

Boxing in the RSJ's, No more steel beams on show.

Today feels like quite a momentous occasion where the last of the steel beams are boxed in with plasterboard. When we moved into the house it was liveable but totally not to our liking. Over the last 10 months we have completely gutted the place, removing most of the downstairs internal walls, raising kitchen ceilings and re-lining all the walls in the house with thermally insulated plasterboard. All this work has seen demolition and destruction but finally the last of the steel beams is being hidden away by new plaster board. It's quite nice knowing that moving forwards all the jobs will be decorating and making good and that there will be no more major renovations... well downstairs at least!

Now all the ceiling needs is some plaster and some paint and that's another job ticked off the massive list!

Fitting the new ceramic kitchen sink.

One of the first things I made clear to my partner when we bought our first house was that I wanted an old fashioned butler style sink. I didn't care about the layout of the kitchen, or the style of cupboard doors as long as I got the sink of my dreams. 

However I soon realised that buying a traditional butler style sink would be setting me back nearly £1000 and our plans soon had to change. However on a recent trip up to Ikea in Bristol we noticed this ceramic sink in a butler style at a quarter of the cost. It was a no brainer, the sink was ordered and would arrive in a few days. 

Unpacking the sink was a little nerve wracking, and once unpacked looked a whole heap bigger than it did in the store. 

James then got to work adjusting the base unit that would house the new sink.

Next on the job list is to sort out the water connection and drainage to the new sink before finally fitting the unit. 

Now all we need to do is buy a beautiful wooden draining rack. (not a plank of wood on plinths) and choose our kitchen cupboard doors and that's another section of kitchen completed. Oh... and keep it tidy unlike the picture!